The Effectiveness of Communication Strategy Explored in African Shared Values Campaign
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Date
2014-11
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Campaign is commonly used in social, political, as well as economic contexts. From product
to idea campaigns calling the target for action are part of our lives these days. Influencing
and persuading people to increase their understanding and action is gaining consid erable
attention in national as well as international campaigns. Of the many instruments to
achieve such a lofty goal in campaign is communication strategy. This study primarily focused on the assessment of the communication strategy employed
by a particular campaign - the African Shared Values (ASV) Campaign - which aimed at
bringing about behavioral change in the habits of Africans towards Africanism. The study
attempted to examine the effectiveness of the communication strategy employed by the
ASV campaign to influence and persuade Africans "towards an integrated, peaceful, and
prosperous Africa". To this end, a qualitative research method was used and data were
collected through document analysis, semi-structured interview, and participant
observation. Fenton Communications' Nine Laws of Successful Advocacy Communications
(2009) was primarily used to analyze and di scuss the data collected. As a result of the
analysis, the study identified that the prime communication strategies were found to be
public dialogue assisted by social media and traditional media. Regarding their effecti veness, the analysis brought forth that the communication strategy suffers from lack
of thorough research, pretesting of messages, aud ience segmentation, budgeting, assigning
of relevant and appropriate expert, and monitoring and evaluation. The study identified,
therefore, need for improvement in the areas of research to fin e-tune the strategy and
inform the preproduction and production phase. Additionally, testing was highly
recommended to ascertain the effectiveness of the strategy in relation to the target
audience as segmented logically. Above all, all ocation of adequate budget and deployment
of relevant professionals were found to be very crucial for meaningful result-oriented
communication in campaign.
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Keywords
African Shared Values Campaign